Software Engineer
Resume Example

With your numerous software engineering skills, languages, and methodologies, you may be asking, “What should I leave in? What should I leave out?” This guide will help you navigate these tough questions.

By following our resume hacks, writing a strong software engineer resume will be simple. Here are four proven tips that will help you debug your resume, get you noticed, and help you land your next job.

1. Keep your resume to one page.

Hiring managers at the biggest tech companies are swamped with hundreds of resumes for each job opening. Chances are, a two-page resume won’t be read in full. Under these circumstances, getting your most marketable qualifications onto a concise one-page resume is one of the most important steps to success.

The easiest way to reduce document length is to reduce work experience. Good programmers know how to prioritize clear code. The same goes for resume writing.

To best showcase your qualifications, write clear, well-structured sentences that explain the depth of your experience. Do this and you’ll prevent yourself from rambling on about your experience.

Additionally, avoid writing more than five bullet points of work experience per position.

2. Clearly list relevant technology skills.

Listing the computer skills required for the position is a no-brainer. The trick, however, is to be precise with your relevant skills. For example, if you use Laravel for PHP, but only list PHP, the hiring manager will be left guessing what framework you’re familiar with.

Always make it easy for hiring managers to perform a fair assessment of your abilities. The candidate in the sample above has succeeded with listing their skills, for these reasons:

• They clearly state their relevant skills early on in the resume.
• They show past skill utilization by describing the ways in which they used them.
• They reference the skills in key sections of the resume, including the summary, skills section, and work experience.

On the other hand, be aware that if you show too many skills, hiring managers may assume that your knowledge is too broad and not deep enough to perform at a high level. It will also look like you made the rookie mistake of bloating your resume with skills you don’t have or aren’t relevant to the job.

Additionally, you need to show depth in a given language and skill. Reference your skill or language multiple times in your resume. If you’re a C++ prodigy, mention the specifics about how you put your knowledge to work at previous positions in the work experience section of your resume.

If you’re not sure where to start, we compiled internal data to determine the top five most popular software engineering skills of 2020 that will continue to be important in 2021. Any of these skills make a great addition to your resume (as long as they’re relevant to the position):

3.  Show what you achieved using your skills.

In addition to including your skills, you need to back up the accomplishments on your resume with hard numbers. This helps illustrate your value to an employer by breaking down exactly what you’re capable of achieving.

Here’s an example of how to do this effectively:

• Designed internal website for agents and management, saving an average $8,000 in labor costs per week.

In this example, the candidate emphasizes their ability to successfully take on a large-scale development project (including planning, development, and execution).

Mastering the Do’s and Don’ts

4. Target your resume for each job application.

Targeting your resume for one job at a time is by far the best method for standing out and getting an interview. That’s because tailoring your resume makes you look ideal for the position.

There are two main steps to targeting your resume: first, research the company and take note of any specific requirements. Then, customize your resume, including these requirements throughout.

Conduct extensive background research on all of the companies you are interested in working for. What are their products? Do you know how these products are designed? What are the technologies behind their products? And equally important, do you understand what the business is trying to accomplish?

These leading questions will help you delve deeper into the needs of the company. They will also help you further optimize your resume, and even glean useful nuggets to address in your cover letter or interview.

Customize your resume by optimizing your resume introduction and professional experience sections by addressing the job’s needs with your related background.